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The foreign reactionaries who accuse us of practicing "dictatorship" or "totalitarianism" are the very persons who practice it. They practice the dictatorship or totalitarianism of one class, the bourgeoisie, over the proletariat and the rest of the people.
— Mao Zedong, On the People's Democratic Dictatorship, 1949 June 30
Totalitarianism is a concept widely used by the Western bourgeois media to conflate progressive communist or anti-imperialist governments with reactionary fascist governments.
This term has been developed by Western scholars who defend liberal democracy as the highest form of human society, completely ignoring the negative dimensions of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
History[edit | edit source]
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that Nazi and Communist governments were new forms of government and not merely updated versions of the old tyrannies. According to Arendt, the source of the mass appeal of totalitarian regimes is their ideology which provides a comforting and single answer to the mysteries of the past, present and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of race struggle and for Marxism–Leninism all history is the history of class struggle. Once that premise is accepted, all actions of the state can be justified by appeal to nature or the law of history, justifying their establishment of authoritarian state apparatus.[1]
National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter and Rockefeller-connected Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to introduce the concept of totalitarianism to university social science and professional research as a way to characterize and criticize the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[2]
Michael Parenti and James Petras have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how "left anti-communism" attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War.[3] For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom in order to attack "Stalinist totalitarianism".[4] More recently, Enzo Traverso has attacked the creators of the concept of totalitarianism as having invented it to designate the enemies of the West.[5] Historian Domenico Losurdo outlines that the horrors which supposedly equate Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are not without historical parallel. He further outlines that they had significantly differing policies on the treatment of Eastern European nations and that Nazi rhetoric struck a chord with Western colonial ideas. In fact, Indian leader Gandhi remarked that Stalin was a "great man" and that "in India we have Hitlerian rule, however disguised it may be in softer terms." The fact that the Soviet Union was the last to compromise and the political-historical conditions behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact must be remembered rather than using the historical event to invent such a false dichotomy.[6]
Definition[edit | edit source]
According to Arendt, features of totalitarianism include one-man rule, a communications monopoly, and terroristic police. The United States fits all three of these characteristics: unilateral action by the President such as starting wars without approval from Congress, state-controlled media (the Committee on Public Information during the First World War), and the Espionage Act, which bans all criticism of the state.[7]
See also[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Villa, Dana Richard (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (pp. 2–3). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139000314 doi: 10.1017/CCOL0521641985 [HUB]
- ↑ Brzezinski, Zbigniew; Friedrich, Carl (1956). Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674332607
- ↑ Parenti, Michael (1997). Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (pp. 41–58). San Francisco: City Lights Books. ISBN 978-0872863293
- ↑ James Petras (1999). The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited, vol. 51. Monthly Review.
- ↑ Traverso, Enzo (2001). Totalitarianism: the twentieth century in debate (French: Le Totalitarisme: Le XXe siècle en débat). Poche. ISBN 978-2020378574
- ↑ Losurdo, Domenico (2016). 'Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies'.
- ↑ Domenico Losurdo (2023-06-23). "Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism" Red Sails. Archived from the original on 2023-06-23.